Celestial Punks: A Retro Review of Cocteau Twins' "Head Over Heels"

Cocteau Twins in 1983

In late 1986, I got up early one morning to get ready for high school.  A moody teenager, most of my wardrobe consisted of black, and I would use copious amounts of gel and hairspray to make my hair stand on end.  That morning, while I got ready, I put "The Pink Opaque" on the record player.  This was a collection of Cocteau Twin's work from the early '80s.

It was the perfect music to me, at that time.  It was ethereal and magical, marked by Robin Guthrie's layered and textured guitar and Elizabeth Frasier's dulcid voice singing nonsense words.  Their music transcended description.  They weren't really rock, and they weren't really pop.  It was kind of hard to figure out what kind of music they were.  They were in a class all by themselves.

After I finished getting ready, I left the house with my books, and I didn't get very far from the house when I realized that I had left the record player on.  I went back into the house to find my older brother, Tony, squatting in front of the speaker, listening to "Musette And Drums" playing.  I froze.  Tony was a devout metalhead and took occasion to make fun of my musical tastes.

"Musette And Drums" - a selection off of Cocteau Twin's second album, "Head Over Heels" - starts out with the drum machine pounding a heavy waltz.  Guthrie's distorted guitars sway back and forth like a dark ballerina dancing to Frasier's plaintive wails.  During the chorus, Frasier pleads desperately, accented by a low keyboard.  The song finishes with an odd guitar solo - Frasier scratching on his guitar to make the howls of a ghost.

Tony sat squatting in front of the speaker while I was suspended, motionless, awaiting his verdict.  After a moment, he looked at me and said, "Not bad.  They need to clean up their sound a bit."

My heart soared with exultation.  I felt like I was finally vindicated in my love for this band.  A couple of years later, Tony would be just as excited about their fifth studio album, "Blue Bell Knoll".

Tony's description of "Musette And Drums" was accurate.  A beautiful wall of sound with messy production  value.

Back in the day, I owned every single Cocteau Twins release - either on cassette or vinyl.  Now, I own almost every release digitally remastered.  However, "Head Over Heels" was always my least favorite Cocteau Twins album.  I always loved their hardcore gothic on 1982's "Garlands", and I loved their Classical Greek weirdness on 1984's "Treasure".  But you could really tell that they were trying to find their sound on 1983's "Head Over Heels".  It wasn't until recently that I realized that I had absolutely no digital copy of "Musette And Drums".  So I decided to download "Head Over Heels".  Now, it has become one of my favorite Cocteau releases.

By 1983, Cocteau Twins had released one album and a few EPs that were most definitely spooky and gothic, dominated by Will Heggie's heavy bass guitar.  Then he left the band, and, for a while, before they accumulated keyboardist Simon Raymonde, it was just Guthrie and Frasier, left to develop their own sound.  They did a lot of experimentation, using a lot of jazz, even with a saxophone.  At the time, I didn't like it.  To me, it just didn't sound like the Cocteau Twins I was used to.

But listening to it today, it has a dreamy quality and a sense of trying to break out of the bonds of traditional pop music.  The album begins with "When Mama Was Moth", probably the most gothic song on the album.  The drums beat out an uneven rhythm like a heart in cardiac arrest, followed by a keyboard plinking out a mystic music box melody.  Frasier's voice billows over it all until the music suddenly seizes leaving only Frasier to scream, "Mother etching" or "Mother retching."  It's hard to to understand exactly what she is saying, and that is the beauty of it.

The next song is a beautiful number called "Five Ten Fiftyfold" dominated by a Heggie-style bass and saxaphone.  Frasier's vocals, while powerful, seem to be a background instrument like an echo crashing on the mountainside.  "Sugar Hiccup" is a well-known Cocteau song, and it is here that Guthrie is learning to use his guitar to create monstrous landscapes of sound.  Other songs of note are "In Our Angelhood", "In the Gold Dust Rush", and "My Love Paramour".  The album finishes out perfectly with "Musette And Drums".

It has been nice to rediscover this album.  The way I have always viewed Cocteau Twins - they spent the better part of a decade trying to find their sound, pushing into new territories, paving the way for other musicians to imitate.  Then it seems that once they had found themselves, we lost them.  I am praying for a miracle, for my celestial punks to return.